Really, if it uses Web techonology, target the browser(s) I already have installed.
This coming from someone that has mostly done Web stuff in the last 20 years.
Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
141–150 of 253 posts
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#142I see all these "Alternative to $FOO" type projects that differ in the implementation but not in the result; IOW to the end-user the product looks and behaves practically the same as $FOO. I understand wanting to produce an alternative, but I can't help but wonder why not produce an alternative that is substantially different? [1] From the screenshots Linen is almost a clone of Slack, with (I think) the biggest diffe…
Linen is significantly cheaper than Slack
$10/month for up to 100 users compared to Slack's $7.25/user/month.
What it really comes down to is integrations. For a team to consider Linen, they'd have to get their Jira tickets in there, bitbucket/github hooks etc. as well as external integration with Okta/azure SSO etc. That will make or break Linen, more so than being indexable. Because if you want indexed content, you're likely working on an open source project or are open which means without revenues, and so you won't be willing to pay much.
I'm glad an alternative to Slack, cheaper, with open search is available.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#143I build and ship a production application using tauri and linux support is the most painful experience I had in a long time. They use WebKit GTK which is really not a good fondation IMO, its hard to test for all versions, its much slower than other browser, it has weird bugs. In general the idea of not shipping a browser bundle is nice, in practice it doesn't really work for a startup. It's just too much unrelated te…
Here is an idea, do a Web application.
Most of the Electron junk can be easily done as pure Web application, of course authors don't want to pay for hosting and ship a browser and server with the application.
There are a very tiny percentage of such startup ideas that really need features not available on a standard Web browser.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#144> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…
> why not going for a JVM-based technology? Not to pick on the JVM, but does anyone actually build new desktop software for the JVM that's meant to be downloaded and installed by mainstream consumers? Qt and other frameworks work pretty well (with their own flaws) but I'd simply never even consider the JVM as a viable option for desktop software. The last JVM app I installed was probably Minecraft in 2012.
Jetbrains does. Millions of developers are using a swing ui and don’t even know.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#145I understand this is more tailored at communities and such (being the Business plan the last in the tier), but for Linen to be a Slack alternative we'd need App integrations (Google Calendar, Jira, etc) as well as other features such as to send scheduled messages, snooze/bookmark incoming messages for later, a strong channel administration/management, and a few other features that increase productivity and we can't live without.
As I said, businesses are probably not the main target customers for Linen so it's completely understandable, I would've loved it though. Great work!
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it's probably Ghidra or Jetbrains IDEA in 2023. Both are desktop, thought I could see the debate on whether or not developers are considered mainstream consumers. I use them on Linux and Windows, so I definitely get value out of their cross platform capabilities. I use Eclipse-based tools at work (again, I can see the debate). It seems like Samsung's Smarthings (IoT platform) used to use Groovy, but has recent…
Its never fun finding the correct java version to get ghidra going on a new machine. I don't use java often enough to remember versioning differences between the official and openjdk. I never install the right one on the first try, always requires a trip to the ghidra docs. I must have gone through this 7 or 8 times in the last 5 years. Its also really rare for a desktop app written in java to look good. I'm sure its…
These days Ghidra usually works fine on any of the last 3-4 Java versions.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to those benchmarks Tauri still issues about 25000 syscalls at startup and needs about 300mb of ram for a “hello world” app. That might be slimmer than electron, but it’s still ridiculous given what it’s doing.
> That might be slimmer than electron, but it’s still ridiculous given what it’s doing. Then I think your beef is with the class of apps, not Tauri or Rust. > Tauri still issues about 25000 syscalls at startup and needs about 300mb of ram for a “hello world” app How many syscalls and how much memory does your web browser require on startup? I'm not the biggest fan of JS apps, Electron, etc., but it's simply ridiculou…
> Then I think your beef is with the class of apps, not Tauri or Rust.
Are you saying that "WebGUI" is the primary category you'd place this app in?
For end-users, the category is "chat apps". I grant the point, though, that these days there may not be any difference between the two.
> It's become chic to yell about the good old days when it didn't take your editor a few seconds to startup, and I agree, but I think this lament actually requires an answer 1) in the form of code, 2) in a language everyone can learn 3) that runs on everything.
While I ordinarily agree with this sentiment, the big pitch about this particular product is performance.
From the landing page, this is literally the first bullet point listed:
> Linen is 1000x more lightweight than alternatives. This means that we load faster, use less bandwidth and are more responsive
In this respect, I think that using 500MB on the 3MB transfer benchmark contradicts the 1000x more lightweight claim. I've never seen Slack or similar need even 10x as much RAM as the benchmark results.
Last I used Slack, it was using around 1GB of RAM in daily and active use.
At any rate, these are the things that get funded by VCs? It seems to me that the world is not crying out for a slightly more lightweight Slack alternative.
Some demand? Sure, for free tiers and low-cost tiers ... but how do they expect to monetise those free and low-cost users? The free tiers are usually subsidised by the enterprise tiers.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#148Unrelated question. Anyone know if it would be difficult to write a SwiftUI “compiler” to non-Mac architectures, including wasm? (I’m not a ui developer). I mean, I realize it is probably non-trivial, like most cross-platform ui, but I have been imagining that Apple would do this since they released it, so that their webapps could be written in SwiftUI instead of whatever they are doing now…
Hard, but doable. I don’t see Apple doing it anytime soon because it doesn’t really gain them anything but here’s a third party demo: https://github.com/swiftwebui/SwiftWebUI
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#149I see all these "Alternative to $FOO" type projects that differ in the implementation but not in the result; IOW to the end-user the product looks and behaves practically the same as $FOO. I understand wanting to produce an alternative, but I can't help but wonder why not produce an alternative that is substantially different? [1] From the screenshots Linen is almost a clone of Slack, with (I think) the biggest diffe…
Linen is significantly cheaper than Slack $10/month for up to 100 users compared to Slack's $7.25/user/month. What it really comes down to is integrations. For a team to consider Linen, they'd have to get their Jira tickets in there, bitbucket/github hooks etc. as well as external integration with Okta/azure SSO etc. That will make or break Linen, more so than being indexable. Because if you want indexed content, you…
> $10/month for up to 100 users compared to Slack's $7.25/user/month.
> For a team to consider Linen, they'd have to get their Jira tickets in there, bitbucket/github hooks etc. as well as external integration with Okta/azure SSO etc.
Yeah, but those things cost money, usually per user, and with good reason.
Just comprehensive SSO alone is something that costs around $5/user/month. Sure, the Linen team could write it themselves, but it won't work anywhere nearly as nicely or as performant as signing up for an SSO service that works with everything a corporate uses for sign-ins.
So, yeah, it can be $1/user/month now, but it's unlikely to remain that way when they need to add in all the Slack functionality. It's also unlikely to remain performant when it matches Slack feature-for-feature.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#150> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…
Or why not use Flutter? You can integrate with Rust as FFI via flutter_rust_bridge. That's what I do as Flutter is pretty cross platform yet much leaner than even using a browser engine.
A good idea. I think Flutter loses quite badly to React for web apps. But if you want to build a cross-platform app it works well. Dart is similar to Javascript and not difficult to pick up.